Primary Forms

Primary Forms is a periodic programme designed for pupils from the fourth through the eighth grade of primary school, carried out by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Roman Czernecki Educational Foundation. This year sees its second edition.

The program includes the creation of a box housing a proposal for an exhibition, which can materialize at any time in a shape chosen by the pupils, supported by the teachers' staff and the Museum's education team.

Among the artists who prepared their unusual artworks this year, especially at the invitation of " Primary Forms," were 8 artists from Poland and abroad: Adriano Costa, Jaroslaw Flicinski, Veronika Hapchenko, Edith Karlson, Krzysztof Maniak, Ahmet Öğüt, Olivia Plender, Laure Prouvost.

Their works were packaged in special toolboxes designed by architect Maciej Siuda (resembling large pencil cases in shape) and sent to 10 selected elementary schools from towns of less than 30,000 residents in the Mazovia Province and 4 cultural institutions.

The boxes and the artworks in them are the basis for further activities carried out in schools. They are "dormant" art, instructions and proposals for artistic activities and experiments, which are an invitation and inspiration for pupils to work together to prepare their own works of art and final exhibitions in the space of schools (in classrooms, corridors or on the playground). They will be assisted by their teachers and museum educators from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, who will visit the schools.

Designed in the form of artistic exercises and objects placed in the box, the exhibition refers to the tradition of art history: to Marcel Duchamp and his travelling exhibition-in-a-suitcase, as well as to “Fluxkits” – boxes prepared by artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement, containing scores, models, audio recordings, games, puzzles, and stencils, among other items. Primary Forms also alludes to other experiments in the fields of art and education undertaken in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Pure Consciousness – the series of On Kawara’s exhibition in kindergartens, initiated in 1998. Paintings by this Japanese conceptual artist could be used as teaching props helping to learn the days of the week and numbers.

The programme is carried out in classrooms and corridors, gym halls and schoolyards. The exhibition in a box can be executed numerous times and interpreted in various ways (through the selection of different fragments, scale, colours, etc.). We use it to ask the following questions: what can we do with art? What can an exhibition be? What can we learn from artists? Is knowledge created through contact with art? And finally, how to understand art or enjoy not understanding it?

Primary Forms was inspired by the School Prints initiative, carried out for a brief period in the UK right after World War II. On that occasion, a set of lithographs created by a group of esteemed artists was sent to primary schools. Those artists included Barbara Jones, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, John Nash, and Pablo Picasso, among other figures.

The Primary Forms programme is developed under the curatorial supervision of Sebastian Cichocki and Helena Czernecka. 

read more on the website:
formy.artmuseum.pl